Fair Share
In an ideal world, everyone in your party is a loot communist. The caster gets the scrolls, the warrior gets the beat stick, and the skill monkey gets the trombone of invisibility (or whatever random absurdity the skill monkey wants to claim this week). In other words, the right loot goes to the right person, never mind the value. You’re a team after all, and those sweet, sweet magic items are there to help you all succeed, whether or not one of you happens to have 10% more wealth-by-level. Besides, you can always make up the difference in raw currency. That’s what gold is for; it evens out the disparity if one of you happens to stumble over a belt of significantly better stats. Besides again, you’ve got a GM at the head of the table who will (in that aforementioned ideal world) provide magic items tailored for the rest of the party. My theory goes that, if you’re patient, everything will even out in the end.
The alternative is to be “perfectly fair” by selling off everything and dividing up the profits. Sounds great on paper, but it’s super inefficient in practice. In D&D 3.X you only get half value for your loot, meaning you get more bang for your buck by sticking with whatever happens to fall in your path.
Then of course there’s players like Fighter. They’re the reason that you’ve got to invent a party charter and give out shares like you’re the goddamn Pirates of the Caribbean. And I don’t think I have to tell you why that’s a pain in the ass.
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I had an artificer once. Charged the party what it cost me to make the items plus 10% to help defray xp costs, and mostly used the extra cash to craft utility or party buff items while largely saving my own share for personal toys. Given enough time and the right feat or three to reduce crafting expenses, you can sell all your loot and wind up with a little more than you started with, and what you do have is tailor made to suit your party members needs.
If anybody really wanted something out of party loot, it counted towards their share at what it would have cost me to craft it (without the +10%) unless I couldn’t make it yet, in which case it counted for what we would have sold it for.
I had a lot of spreadsheets. But it was fun milking the crafting system for all it was worth, and it was nice to have a character that could make the whole dang party OP without overshadowing anybody.
I came into the hobby in the last days of 3.5, so I never had to deal with the hit to XP. Did the bump in gold make up for the hit in level?
At the session before last, when our characters got back to town, the GM had an NPC running a traveling animal shop. My character Irlana the Hunter bought 3 baby piggies and stuck around to see what else was there. The NPC brought out a baby Thunderbird and started up an auction for it. Our Fighter (who’s a lot nicer than your Fighter) really wanted it and started bidding, but eventually got outbid by a noble NPC. So Irlana started bidding and won the baby Thunderbird for 200k gold. The GM asked if I could afford it and was stunned when I showed him how much I had. It’s nearly 3 mil in gold. He couldn’t believe it and the other players had to remind him of when he used to just chuck a bunch of gold at us and that I spent a lot less than everyone else so it built up.
That’s like… 10.18 palaces worth of baby bird. Your economy is bananas!
Yup. There have been jokes about Irlana’s massive wealth.
Late reply, I know but I had to smile because I have a very strong imagination and in my mind instantly a picture poped up. Something like picturing your character at the auction going something like this “Just let me get my portable hole wallet out to get you the 200.000 GP.” 😉
The main party I got into playing DnD with had one player who was totally a That Guy type. He was the sort of person who played like Fighter, save his character was a Cleric. One who actually cast spells so infrequently that another player who hadn’t looked too closely at the rules legitimately didn’t realize clerics were primary spellcasters until much later, when she was thinking of building a divine champion PC herself.
Anyways, HE was the sole reason the party had to wealth charter things, and while most of the party was pretty good at ‘items-go-to-who-benefits-from-them-the-most’ he would always insist on claiming whatever items were best with him instead, meaning he and whoever else wanted it would have a roll off for it.
Anyways, skip ahead to campaign conclusion and their divying up final loot hauls, and one thing the party found was an (Epic, because the whole party was level 30-something at this point) Elven Greatbow. No one in the party was an elf, and if you weren’t an elf the bow was just an okay-underwhelming-for-it’s-level magic bow. No one really needed it, but one character said she had an idea what do with it and asked if she could pay it’s worth from her share of the loot to have it. The entire rest of the party said ‘sure’, they had no issue with that. Except That Guy. He insisted he should have it, even though he couldn’t use it, and it was abundantly clear he was just planning to sell it.
So the two players rolled off for it and she won the bow instead of that guy.
The GM in question was a bit of an old-school gamer, he was literally older than all the players (by enough decades he was the same age as some of the player’s parents) and he’d been playing DnD since first Ed. As a DM he wasn’t a bad guy, but he was a bit of a munchkin, with a hobby of intentionally building ridiculous and powerful enemies that half the time the party needed to rely on his similarly ridiculously built GMPCs to take out. One of the parties allied NPCs was a nuetral-selfish magic item Craftsman who was also epic levels, and had followed an obscure (and long) feat tree so he could make Epic magic items without having to pay Epic prices, instead using the non-epic price chart for calculating costs.
He was also an Elf. And had taken full levels in the prestige class Order of the Bow Initiate, so for this NPC archery was practically a religion.
The character who won the roll off took the (Epic) Elven Greatbow and traded it (along with whatever esoteric materials he might need) to the NPC for everything he was willing to make her in exchange for it.
She ended up getting her full equipment set and a backup set of her equipment made from White Dragonhide. The rest of the party thought she was clever as hell for thinking of that, and That Guy was especially pissed because he clearly hadn’t thought of that and had just been planning to sell the Bow for itsbgold value on the open market.